Hybrid View

Ties to Music Selection and the Oscars

This was brought up, kinda, in the program thread, that a lot of teams/skaters all jump on using the music of the movie that won best oscar. This year it's the Artist (which I believe also won best "soundtrack").

It got me thinking, that while everyone jumps on the bandwagon the season after teh oscar wins, that doesn't guaruntee that it will become a "forever warhorse". Some do (Man in the Iron mask comes to mind), but most don't. Why is that?

Man in the Iron Mask didn't come anywhere close to the Oscars. Just had a soundtrack that works really well for this type of performance art. There's an ingrained level of prestige, though, that makes the Oscar-nominated selections automatically acceptable to skate to.

Actually, more often than not, the music that wins the Oscar for best score remains unused by top skaters. I pay particular attention because in the last few decades, a lot of the best score winners wind up being some of my favorite music. And I keep hoping skaters would use them, but no one does.

Best score winners I wish more skaters would use:

Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score - Tomas Verner used it, but his program wasn't that great. It's a truly great score with lots of dynamic and varied musical motifs that could be easily configured into a good program. I don't know why more skaters don't use it.

Elliot Goldenthal's Frida score - All I remember is this one female skater I really did not care for using it. Great and flavorful score, although there may be too much vocals on it to make it easily adaptable to skating (if only that would stop Tango De Roxanne, though).

Michael Giacchino's score for the film Up - A sometimes lighthearted, often whimsical and sometimes poignant score to the great Pixar film. Its lack of use in skating may be due to the fact that when the film came out, Disney had a moratorium on merchandising the film (because some of the subject matter in the film were so serious/sad ), this meant there was no physical release of the film's music until 2011. This hampered the spread of the film's score. On the other hand, that didn't stop the score from winning an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a Grammy, one of the very few movie scores to ever do so. Figure skaters just have awful taste.

A. R. Rahman's score to Slumdog Millionaire - I love this soundtrack, and I think it would be great for skating... except almost every piece on it has vocals. So it's only going to be used in ice dancing until the rule change kicks in.

Other recent best score winners that aren't used much:

Gustavo Santaolalla's score to Brokeback Mountain - No surprise there. Considering that figure skating is a sport with fewer openly gay high level competitors in its history than rugby, skaters are going to stay the heck away from Brokeback Mountain.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score to The Social Network - I can see why. Most of the pieces in the score are minimalistic mood pieces that wouldn't lend themselves to a skating program.

And I don't ever recall skaters using the Oscar-winning scores to Babel, Atonement, et al. In fact, I reckon the majority of the best score winners have been completely ignored by top skaters.